Artifacts | Jeff Koons, Car Painter

Winning is not supposed to be everything but that’s just what we say to a losing team. To the victors go all the spoils. For some, they include a new BMW. For BMW, the prize is art — or rather artists. It helps if they are famous enough to be their own brands — a Warhol, Lichtenstein or Haring — and a big enough sport to paint a race car headed for Le Mans. For this June’s grand prix, the artist is Jeff Koons.

At a press conference with BMW executives this week, Koons unveiled his design for the company’s next “Art Car.” It’s the 17th in a series that began in 1975 with a custom paint job by Alexander Calder, the man who invented the “mobile” in sculpture. His car was in the room. It was a primary-colored patchwork of Calder boomerangs and looked pretty cute. Koons’s model was there too, a plain white M3 GT2 to be driven by Andy Priaulx. This car can get to 100 miles per hour in three seconds. Koons will give it an added boost with a finish he says will express “the aesthetics of winning.”

Courtesy BMWKoons in his blank canvas, the plain white M3 GT2.

Who knew that winning had an actual look? At BMW’s dog-and-pony show, Koons characterized his explosion of color — basically racing stripes on steroids — as a metaphor for the car’s “brutal energy.” I took that as a euphemism for sexual energy, which drives most of Koons’s art. (Even his seemingly innocent “Balloon Dog” suggests coupling genitalia.) The language of cars also lends itself to innuendo: think “drive shaft,” “cruising” or “dip stick.” Cars themselves are a fetish, a seat of seduction. In other words, this match of car and artist is really a gas.

To come up with his design, Koons studied engineers’ representations of movement before finding his real inspiration: the colored lights on a Christmas wreath he saw in passing. (The car’s interior will have a silver lining.) He said that computer renderings did not do his idea justice; in three dimensions he will bring it to “a higher level,” one that would equal the Art Cars of Warhol and Lichtenstein, his heroes.

Archival films showed those artists and others hand-painting their cars with brushes. Koons, who employs up to a hundred younger artists to do the drudge work for his own creations, will direct a team of BMW painters for this project. He will add his own signature during a June 1 ceremony at the Pompidou Center in Paris, where the car will be on display for 24 hours before heading to Le Mans.

The museum has exhibited BMW Art Cars since 1977, the year it opened. Only a few years before, both Calder and Warhol painted passenger jets for Braniff Airways. It did not help the airline stay alive, but that hasn’t discouraged anyone from using art as a marketing tool. Remember Takashi Murakami’s Vuitton bags? Runaway best sellers.

Still, it’s embarrassing to watch top artists shill for their supper, even if BMW does not pay them for their trouble. (It doesn’t.) So what do the artists get from it? They are doing more for the company than BMW is doing for them.

Koons got a chance to drive the model he is painting. A video documenting that test drive shows him braking into a wild spin. The look on his face was sheer terror. That’s the thing about brutal energy. It doesn’t know who its friends are, and it wants to kill the competition. Of course, the car wasn’t yet a Koons. As Priaulx put it, “If it looks good, it goes good.” Just goes to show: winning isn’t everything, even in racing. What counts is how it looks.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 2, 2010

Because of an editing error, a report in The Moment column last Sunday about a BMW Art Car that will compete in the Le Mans 24-hour race in June misstated the plans for the car after that. It will be displayed at various cultural institutions; it will not be awarded to the race winner.